


a minute in time

by revolutionarygold



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Book compliant, Domesticity, F/M, Post-War, Pregnancy Tests, So Hecking Soft, adult demigods with normal lives, give my kids happy endings.jpg, jason with a towel on his shoulder is an important mental image, soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-09
Updated: 2018-04-09
Packaged: 2019-04-20 12:01:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14260536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/revolutionarygold/pseuds/revolutionarygold
Summary: Piper McLean had stared down gods and titans, talked down monsters who wanted to rip her throat out. She had appeased primordial beings as old as the Earth itself. She had been to Hell and survived with not much more than a smile and a knife. She was twenty four years old, a graduate of Cornell University, and had once been Annabeth Chase’s roommate. Buying an at-home pregnancy test, she decided, was the most terrifying experience of her life.





	a minute in time

_sixty_

“Jace?”  
“Give me just a minute, Piper-”

She could hear him moving in the kitchen, the pans clanging uncomfortably loud as he finished putting up the clean dishes. She heard the cabinets close, then the dishwasher, and some other muffled noises as Jason put away his various cleaning paraphernalia. Then she heard his footsteps, padding down the hall to their bedroom where she’d called to him.

“What’d you need?” he asked, standing in the doorway. He wasn’t done cleaning, she could see that - there was still a dish towel thrown over his shoulder - but his eyes were bright and his stance was open. It was a good day, one where the sunlight from their multiple windows smoothed over the darkness that clung to their minds.  
“It- it can wait,” she stuttered, suddenly nervous. He was busy, this was fine.  
“Piper,” he said gently, taking another step into the room, “we talked about this. Nothing is too small for me.”

The daughter of Aphrodite closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She let the tension drain from her shoulders, from her back, her hips, her curled toes. After the war, she had been so focused on everyone else, so convinced that she had gotten off with the least amount of trauma, of hurt and pain, that she hadn’t talked about it for months. Sometimes Piper needed to hear that she was allowed to have problems.

She nodded, and opened her eyes again. She patted the bed next to where she sat on the edge, and Jason complied. He looked directly into her eyes, his own still wide and bright behind his glasses.

Piper gestured vaguely to her phone. It was pulled up to the calendar, and Jason looked at it in curiosity and confusion. Piper led a life with a packed schedule, but her organization method made absolutely no sense to Jason - or anyone, for that matter. He didn’t know what she wanted him to see, so the blonde man sat and waited for her to explain.  
“I, um, realized today that I’m about- about a week late for my period.”

His world froze. The music playing in the kitchen off his phone faded, and the pleasant off-white of their walls disappeared. Piper’s face (her freckles, her tiny braid, her kaleidoscope eyes and the furrow in her forehead as she searched him for answers) was all he could see.

Jason swallowed.

“Alright. Well. We should, um, go get tests, right?”  
“Right!” Piper said, wincing just slightly at how loud she sounded to herself, “That’s - yes. A good plan.”

Jason always had good plans. This would be okay, no matter what happened.  
“I’ll grab your purse when I get my shoes,” he declared, standing and kissing her forehead before he left the room.

Piper sat, took a deep breath in, locked her phone, let out the breath and stood.

_thirty_

Piper McLean had stared down gods and titans, talked down monsters who wanted to rip her throat out. She had appeased primordial beings as old as the Earth itself. She had been to Hell and survived with not much more than a smile and a knife. She was twenty four years old, a graduate of Cornell University, and had once been Annabeth Chase’s roommate.  
Buying an at-home pregnancy test, she decided, was the most terrifying experience of her life. Jason was holding a liter of water in one hand and had kept the other around her waist while she looked read the back of a pleasantly blue box with its pleasant font and pleasant instructions.

“I’m pretty sure they’re all the same,” she declared, “D’you think we should get more than one?”

The son of Jupiter had run a city and a legion by the age of sixteen. He had orchestrated large-scale military action. He had brought peace between old enemies. He was the Pontifex Maximus of the New Roman Legion. This was out of his field of expertise; he shrugged.  
“I will anyway,” Piper decided, trying to sound more confident than he knew she was, “that’s what all the baby vloggers do, at least.”

Jason didn’t quite know how to respond to that, so he moved his hand from her waist when she started to walk towards the self-checkout.  
When Piper was scanning her three boxes and the bottle that Jason wordlessly handed to her, she was struck with the reality of it. A potential baby. Hers. The world she had fought and almost died for was now a reality; she’d always had vaguely poetic thoughts of making the world better for a future that she could raise children in, but it had never seemed like it could materialize. She’d spent so much of her life afraid she was going to die. That seemed to be something of a mood killer when it came to planning for babies.  
Jason took the bag off the station while she paid and entwined his hand in hers as they walked back to their single car.

Once she buckled herself into the passenger’s seat, Piper grabbed the water bottle they’d bought and started to drink.

_ten_

“How’re you feeling about this, Sparky?” Piper asked, leaning into the back of their couch. She was almost done with her water now. They’d been home for a little bit, and it was eerily quiet. Jason was naturally quiet, but he looked like he wanted to speak and just didn’t know if he was allowed to.

“I- I don’t know. How are you feeling?”  
“I just wish I needed to pee so I could get this over with.”

It shocked a laugh out of Jason, and he tipped his head back as he did. His lip scar, so faded and small now, disappeared into the folds of his smile. It was her favorite part of his smile, and Piper felt her heart seized with such a fierce love of this man in front of her.  
If there was anyone to have a baby with, she thought, it was Jason Grace.

“I do want to- to know, for sure,” he said, tentatively, “Do you...want to talk about what we do next?”

Piper took a long drink (almost out of water, now) to avoid answering his question for a moment, rolling it around in her head.

“Not yet,” she said finally, “If it’s positive, we can - talk then.”

Jason nodded, smiling a small smile, and he leaned forward to put a hand on her knee. He didn’t say anything, just squeezed. Piper smiled at his briefly before she lifted her water bottle again to finish off the job.

The dark haired woman stood and grabbed the bag off the table.

“Where do you want me?” Jason asked, still sitting on the couch.  
“I’ll do it in the master bathroom,” she said, “just sit on the bed while I’m peeing.”

So Jason stood and they stood there, face to face - or rather, face to shoulder, because Jason had really sprouted up the summer after the war - staring at each other. Piper lifted her free hand and raised her eyebrows at her boyfriend.  
Slowly, Jason met it with his own hand in what had to be the most confused, unenthusiastic high five in the history of the world.  
Piper scoffed and re-high fived him, smiling at the resulting sound.

“Much better,” she declared, “let’s get this done.”

And she turned on her heel, marching down the hall to their bedroom and the bathroom attached to it.

_three_

Had she done it right? She’d read the instructions twice. Five seconds on each test, no longer-

There! The screens were blinking. Piper hurriedly set them each down on the counter and started the timer on her phone. She did up her pants and stood, watching them blink for a moment before she looked at herself in the mirror.

_If only fifteen year old Piper could see her now._

It was a thought she had somewhat often. How much hope the young teenager could have had if she knew how the story ended.

But Jason was about to pace a ditch in their room, she knew that, so she pushed the door open. The blonde son of Jupiter was in the tiled room in a moment, looking at the blinking screens first and then her.  
“Everything okay?” he asked, taking her hands.  
“It can take three minutes to show results,” she informed him.  
“So we wait?”  
“We wait.”

_two_

Jason was content to stand for the duration, but Piper had unceremoniously dropped herself onto the ground, so he sat next to her. This wasn’t an uncommon position for the two of them, though the location was somewhat strange. But Piper leaned her head on his shoulder, her eyes closed and her breathing even (maybe too even) so he wasn’t going to complain.

He leaned his head against the wall.

They were stable in their lives, in their finances, in their relationship. Both had graduated college the past year. They were still trying to get into their long-term careers, but Jason’s job had health benefits and Piper’s job paid enough to contribute to a savings account while also making rent. If this was a reality and they chose to continue - to have a baby - they could.

He could have a baby.

He could have a small bundle put in his arms with bright eyes and dark hair and freckles, a toddler to help learn how to walk, a child who would host tea parties and soccer games, a teenager with proms and graduations and angst-  
He could raise a hero who lived the life of constant danger that they did, put more in danger because of their mixed blood and their parents who were only mostly avoided because of their cleverness and their proximity to the Jackson-Chase stench of Tartarus. His throat constricted at the idea of this hypothetical baby in the place of the demigods he had known and lost.

Piper shifted on his shoulder, and he saw the most vivid image of her with a swelling stomach, tiny feet kicking at his hand under her skin, the softest noises from an infant in the first few hours after their entrance to the world.

His heart was pounding in his throat, and Jason let his own eyes close.

_one_

Piper breathed in. Jason always smelled like his shampoo - it was an artificial scent, but a pleasant one. Fresh and generic. Percy always smelled like sweat, like dirt and salt, like physicality and the raw power of the ocean but Jason was simpler. She loved him for it, she thought, loved him for the fact that his simple presence during what was at minimum a pregnancy scare was enough to keep her from panicking. His shoulder under her head, his gentle breathing in her ear, and his presence surrounding her, enveloping her.

No matter what happened, she was safe with Jason.

The timer on her phone went off, a jarring beeping that disturbed the almost ethereal quality the silence in their bathroom had taken on. Piper jumped. Jason was standing before she was, but he didn’t look at the tests, only at her. Piper brought herself to her feet slowly, stepping closer to her sink.

She looked down.

The electronic screen on each test was no longer blinking, and it took a moment for her eyes to focus on the font. Jason had stepped behind her, his hands resting lightly on her hips as he read over her shoulder, and Piper let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

“Not pregnant,” she sighed.  
“Are you- disappointed?” Jason asked. She thought that there was maybe just a little bit of disappointment in his own voice, but when she turned around to face him, there was nothing but love and curiosity stamped across his face.  
“I think we need to- to plan it, you know? I want...I want our baby to know they were wanted, straight from the start.”

Jason nodded, a small smile starting to cross his face.

“So someday?” he asked.  
“Someday,” she replied, smiling to answer him.

Jason hummed in the way he did when he was particularly pleased about something but didn’t want anyone to know just how happy he was about it.

“Hell of a way to get us to talk about kids, huh?” she said a moment later. At this, Jason laughed again and he finally, _finally_ , kissed her. She felt his laughter against her mouth, and broke their kiss by laughing herself. They stood in the bathroom, chest to chest, laughing and almost kissing with three negative pregnancy tests on the counter.  
“What about someday...soon?” he asked, his eyes bright with the levity he’d had earlier in the day when he’d asked if she would want to assist him in cleaning behind the fridge.  
“Well how soon are we talking, Mr. Grace?” she answered his question with one of her own, he voice arch but her eyes teasing.  
“As soon as you’d like, Ms. McClean,” he told her before kissing her again.

They could talk about this more - later in the day, later in the week, later in the year - because in that moment, Piper felt eternity stretch out in front of her and for the first time, it didn’t scare her. With Jason’s mouth against hers, she welcomed it.

**Author's Note:**

> and then nine months later, a mcclean-grace baby is born
> 
> KIDDING
> 
> As someone who grew up with PJO and aged fairly concurrently with the characters, the older I get, the more feelings I have about the Prophecy Gang and their lives as they grow up. I just want my kids to have happy lives DANG IT


End file.
